Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 10:36:46AM +0200, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote:
>> (ii) Debian has a QA problem. Sponsorship did nothing to improve it. In
>> fact, I believe sponsorship to be one of the reasons for it.
> On that score, I agree. I would further say there are three main aspects to
> that:
Thanks for taking the time to read, understand and reply to my
explanation of what I feel to be the problem with sponsorship. I feel
that you value my opinion. Especially the part were you completly ignore
it shows off your amazing leadership skills.
> - sponsored maintainers are inhibited from fixing bugs they
> introduce; if their regular sponsor is missing or they don't
> have a regular sponsor, bugs will be left unfixed until they
> can find someone else -- in spite of someone being aware of
> the problem, ready with a fix, and wanting to upload it.
You mean those myriads of bugs tagged "pending", waiting for a sponsor
to come along? People begging on -mentors to finally let them fix their
bugs, as they weren't able to find a sponsor yet?
> - there's no tracking of sponsored maintainers, so it's
> possible for sponsored-maintainers to shop around for someone to
> sponsor their packages if they're uploading something someone
> rejects; "when mummy says no, ask daddy", except multiplied
> by up to 1000 developers.
Sure, giving those people direct upload privileges fixes the problem of
nagging a thousand developers. Usually, the way to shut up children who
want cookies is to give them a car, a hundred bucks and map with the way
to the next supermarket marked, right?
> - it doesn't matter if the maintainer is good, only if the
> package is, so sponsorship doesn't promote skills that help
> avoid bugs being introduced so much as remove specific bugs
> that the sponsor manages to spot
Whereas the DM keyring team has a magic wand turning white when a
maintainer is good, so that they can give upload priviliges only to
those people who are good?
> The proposal addresses all those things
It doesn't. Please start coping with reality before fucking up Debian
even more.
>> [6] In fact, my original understanding of the whole idea was that a
>> small set of DDs (like the proposed DM keyring maintainers) would
>> check every package before a DM would be allowed to upload it on
>> its own. I thought that to be something very, very positive, as it
>> would ensure at least one thorough and proper check, instead of the
>> current tradition of minimal checking done by sponsors.
> I don't think I've ever seen that interpretation before.
You have. We discussed it.
> I certainly don't remember seeing it.
That's probably why you didn't quote the relevant private IRC logs in
one of your past mails.
> I don't think reviewing packages like that is something I'd like to do,
> personally.
Right, reviewing packages is not really your kind of work. NEW certainly
looks like you never do that.
Marc
--
BOFH #198:
Post-it Note Sludge leaked into the monitor.